What is Human Trafficking?

It means people are being bought and sold

1.2 million children are victims of human trafficking every year. They’re sexually exploited, sacrificed, made child brides or workers in sweatshops, used for farm labor, and forced to beg. They are taken or deceived, purchased, sold, and transported with some trafficking groups switching their cargo from drugs to humans.

It's an exponential market

As the second largest source of illegal income worldwide, human trafficking is the fastest growing international crime. 9.1 million men, women, and children are trafficked at any moment.

It's violent

Victims are persuaded to comply by threats and force. Traffickers instill deep fear in their victims by threatening family, physically abusing them, and torturing them.

The United Nations of Office on Drugs and Crime defines it as:

"The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation"

At the PLNU Center for Justice and Reconciliation we are engaged in the issue of human trafficking locally, nationally and internationally providing leadership in research and community organizing. The CJR also launched the Beauty for Ashes Fund.